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Animated Atrocities 143/Transcript
Due to the graphic nature of this show and trying to stay within YouTube's advertiser-friendly community guidelines, I have been forced to take a different approach with this review, so please excuse the odd style of this video. In the past week, or so, Netflix has released a show called Big Mouth. Actually, they've released two animated shows, but we'll talk about The Magic School Bus Rides Again at some point later down the line, I'm sure. This review is based around the more controversial of the two shows, Big Mouth. I watched it the day that it aired, I watched the trailer when it initially dropped, and just from that, I knew that I was going to have to talk about this show in some form or another. It was an awful trailer! Actually, I don't know if that completely explains it. The trailer for Big Mouth might just be the worst trailer for anything ever in history, but a trailer is a trailer. I waited patiently for this show to come out, and I watched it, or I tried to. I have to be honest; when watching Big Mouth--''at least the first couple of episodes, I had a visceral reaction. My reaction to this show was so strong that I didn't even want to review it. Yeah, it took even a lot of doing and thought to even get this far and make a review in this style. If you're wondering, I've only pulled that card once before, saying that something is too bad for me to review with ''Where the Dead Go to Die. I'd leave an annotation guiding you to that video, but YouTube killed those. Where the Dead Go to Die was a movie that went out of its way to include every type of horrific thing that you could imagine, to the point where it was too much for me to handle, and it was certainly too much for YouTube to handle. It had things like bestiality and necrophilia, and other things that I don't want to think about. Whether Big Mouth is too graphic, or out there, or bad for me to personally watch and review, it is definitely too graphic for YouTube. I will say that it is another animation that I don't want to think about, but it is a strange piece and it has gotten such a mixed reaction. As in people either like this show and think it's clever and funny and it holds up well with other cartoons of this era, or they hate it, to the point where it's one of the worst cartoons that they have ever seen in their entire life. I posted my initial reaction, and I've talked to PhantomStrider about this, and we had a discussion about the merits of the show, and he's made his own video. And in the meantime, I've been examining the response to my, well, response. On top of that, before the show even came out, it was given to various reviewers and it held a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a 7.2 on IMDb, and was rated positively by Vanity Fair. It was clear to me that this was much more complex than I initially went on. As a reviewer, it's always good to keep in mind that you never know what a piece of media means to someone else, and you never know might be important and has helped people in hard times. You know, people may say that it's just a game, or it's just a movie, or it's just a television show, but they can mean a lot more to a specific person. People say things like, "That was my childhood," all the time, but I'm going a little deeper than that. For example, I understand that Totally Spies!, which I find awkward and stupid, has helped people discover aspects of their sexuality or particular kink. And then, there are also things like Full House. That show is saccharine and cliche, but it attracted a fanbase of people who grew up or were living in an abusive home life because it proved to be the right type of an escapism, showing them a world where all of the problems were relatively small and benign. Big Mouth seems to be taking this effect in its extreme. The show is about puberty, and how you remember your own puberty and your early teenage years is going to determine how you feel about this show. That is something that I am going to tell you right out of the gate, and it's something I am going to tell you immediately, and it seems to be the common themes of both the good reviews and the bad reviews. Speaking personally, my teenage years were extremely tame. Sometimes, I joke around and say that I've never really been a teenager. I never tried drugs, even marijuana, alcohol, or cigarettes. Even to this day, I don't drink. I've avoided doing reckless and stupid things often associated with being an adolescent, et cetera. I don't say these things to brag; I just want to say where I'm at when it comes to this show is trying to get you to relate. Most importantly though, I've never had a sexual awakening that many teenagers get. I am asexual; I've said this many times. And I really don't like bringing this up as of late, because it's getting to be kind of tacky, but I do think that it's extremely important to the context of this review, as it was most apparent in my teenage years and it really cast an unpleasant view of them in hindsight. My teenage years were the worst part of my life for many reasons, not all of which I'll get into here. But dealing with my peers and their sexual awakening was one of the worst and most annoying aspects of it. All I remember of the majority of my classmates is them calling me gay because I didn't have or want a girlfriend, while they were obsessed with drawing penises on everything. People develop a sense of sexuality before they develop a sense of irony, I assume. But yeah, the show reminds me a lot of that time in my life. If you find that obnoxious, like I do, you're probably not going to have a good time watching the show. Even going beyond sexuality--or lack thereof--if you find your own puberty awkward or stupid, which many people do, you might not like this show either. I've heard it described as "that awkward conversation about sex that you have to have with your parents. A lot of your initial reaction is going to be on how you look back. Many people find this as a time that they'd rather forget. You feel like your own body hates you, you're angry and you don't know why. People are expecting you to "grow up," while they're giving you the permissions and abilities of a child. You listen to a simple plan unironically, it's just a terrible time, and many people start having sexual urges and have thoughts that they can't really articulate, and depending on the culture, might be told to be disgusted by them. You know, I never really grew up in a very religious household, but I know that some people did. In the first episode, a lot of people are very open about their sexuality, and that might not gel with what you remember, depending on where you grew up. Unpleasant times can be comedy gold; much of comedy comes from misery, and if it's a scenario that anybody, or most people, can relate to, there is potential for comedy there. You can make puberty funny in a way that you can make an extreme disease or even death funny, especially when a lot of people would choose the latter as a more pleasant experience over puberty. I obviously don't think that they succeed here, and with the strong backlash, it seems that many people agree. And why is that? Well, they try to relate more than they try to be funny, at least from the start. And that can get awkward, especially if you're in the wrong mindset. The first episode is about the main character seeing his friend's penis and becoming insecure that his friend's is bigger and hairier than his own, and he's obsessing over that to the point where he's having fantasies about his friends becoming giant penises and a basketball game played entirely by penises. If you don't remember being sex-obsessed, or you don't want to remember being a sex-obsessed teenager, it's just... kind of uncomfortable. And I have to be forward, this show makes me very uncomfortable in a way that I haven't been watching a show for a very long time. It took me some time to even be able to articulate this without just ranting about how sexually-charged the whole thing is. Maybe it's the Uncle Grandpa effect, where it shows me a world so alien to my own, that I can't possibly relate to it. Or maybe it's the Malcolm in the Middle effect, where it shows me an aspect of my life or my past that I just want to forget and as such, I have a negative reaction to the show. Maybe it's a little bit of both, but I just find myself repulsed by a lot of what I was given in the first episode. The show personifies puberty as a raging monster that seems to be a parody of imaginary friend movies or shows, only the person who has one can hear and see it, and it tells the main character to say and do... stuff. Yeah, le-let's just play "teenager" and put all the sexual aspects in a folder called "stuff" and hope nobody ever finds it and decides to look inside. I-I'd say that it's a cute concept, but the problem with saying that the show is cute kind of makes me feel dirty. Going off-topic a bit, uh, let's talk about the character designs. Here, I'm not going to be polite or reserve hesitation. These are some awful character designs and I hate how the show looks. The people look like fish! It's like Shark Tale in reverse. I know that it's become a standard to put no thought or effort into your character design in adult animation, but I hate that it's become a standard to put no thought or effort into your character design in adult animation! I am seriously sick at this trend, and it's very likely that I would have had a hard time liking the show on this fascet alone! While cartoons aimed at children seem to be developing their own consistent problems, namely the lack of model sheets in shows like Steven Universe or O.K. KO, I don't think that I've ever seen one cartoon aimed specifically at adults that cares about the animation. I guess a lot of that comes from things like The Simpsons having all of their main characters yellow and having weird, abstract shapes for their heads, and South Park being completely cut out, but we're at a point where this trend really, really needs to stop. Whether it's characters with absurdly large heads like in Allen Gregory or in Big Mouth, whether designs are just unpleasant to look at like Mr. Pickles or like in Big Mouth, or a show that doesn't understand the basics of facial anatomy, like Big Mouth. Also, Big Mouth is a stupid title. They name-drop it at the end of the first episode, saying that one of the main characters has a big mouth, but it's the most stupid title that you could possibly give this show. I don't know, maybe they're trying to make it sound like a porn username? I-I do not know. It's a stupid title. Back to the animation, though. Look at this image, here. The kid in the center is the king of these bad designs. His head is exactly the same size as his body. And unlike The Fairly OddParents, it's not exactly stylized to make this less noticeable. His forehead is half the size of his head, almost like they're trying to make an abstract painting. His eyes and eyebrows don't even look like they're attached to his head. But the worst detail would be his absurdly large mouth and lips with rounded teeth. His father also has a similarly bad design that's reminiscent of a not advertizer-friendly frog that I don't want to get sued or striked for mentioning. Seriously, I'm not the only one who sees this, right? It's strange because this show seems to have a budget, as the backgrounds and environments are actually drawn well and very well-detailed. It's just populated by freaky fish-people. And I get it, the show's focus is on dialogue and situations; it's a script-driven show. But if you don't want to put any effort into the quality of the animation, don't make it an animation! The medium has specific advantages, but it also has specific requirements. And these designs just make me sad, like a sad frog, because I know I can do better and I'm still learning! Most of this review is focusing on the first episode, 'cause the first episode is certainly the worst as far as I know, as in the show gets less creepy as it goes on. But these are the designs that they're going to be stuck with for the entirety of the show's run, and that's not a good thing. The puberty monsters do have decent designs and certainly look interesting. They seem to be taking influence from Where the Wild Things Are, which I guess is a pun in and of itself. But it really only communicates that they don't know how to allocate the resources properly. No matter how good the monsters look, most of the cast just...doesn't, and it's really noticeable and it's constantly noticeable. Along with all of the animation quirks that you get with adult cartoons like this, characters not moving, just standing in a room facing each other with half-weighted expressions, just talking about things that cartoons with higher budgets would actually go out of their way to show. I'm not asking for every scene to have anime fighting-levels of quality, but you should at least show me that you wanted to make a cartoon for some other reason than budgetary concerns. On that note, I should also state that the teenagers sound like full-grown adults. I don't mind it, but a lot of people seem to have a problem with it as a cliche that's really taken hold as of late, with shows like Gravity Falls or the new DuckTales, with kids that sound like adults. My problem is actually kind of the opposite when a voice actor will use their exact same voice for everything that they do. For example, no matter who Kristen Schaal voices, I will always hear Mabel, which gets kind of awkward when she plays a character like Sarah Lynn. But that's a discussion for another day. I'm going to level with you. My initial reactions to this show were extremely negative, like upon watching this show, I stated that I'd rather review another episode of Adult Party Cartoon. I'm probably not going to do that because it would largely be pointless, but I was going to make a joke about how badly I didn't want to look or think about, or review at this specific show, and that would lead to the Adult Party Cartoon review of... I guess "Stimpy's Pregnant" is the other one that's really infamous. And yes, I am going to admit that I haven't watched every single episode. This is a review of episode one for the most part. When the first episode of your show is about someone's insecurities about their penis, and then the second episode is about someone's first period, I wasn't interested in talking about episode ten, which is apparently about porn addiction. And I know the argument already: BoJack Horseman got better after the first few episodes. I watched through that. The Legend of Korra got better after the first few seasons, and I watched through all of that. What makes this different? Well, if BoJack or Korra started on this level to me, I would have quit them early on and I wouldn't have looked back. I really do not like the first episode of this show. On top of that, I don't know how much I would eventually be able to get into it at all. Remember, it's a show about puberty, a time of my life that I'd rather forget for every possible reason and do not want to be reminded about. Needless to say, that's not going to pique my interest like Korra's world-building and character development, or BoJack's intense emotional rollercoaster. I tried to give this show as much benefit as I possibly could. A trailer is one thing and yeah, it would be unfair for me as a critic to say that a show sucked solely because of its trailer. I mean, I can predict that it's awful through the trailer--that's fine, but to definitively say that the show is awful because I've only seen the trailer, that-that's unreasonable. This is a review of episode one, and I did get through episode one for better or for worse. I had to force myself to do it, but I did it, and this video is titled "review of episode one". That's mostly because you can't put the title of episode one in a YouTube video without getting into trouble. Category:Transcripts Category:Season 5